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The Chancellor was told to relax his austerity plans yesterday, hours before
Britain learns whether the economy contracted at the end of last year.

Olivier Blanchard, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund,
said that George Osborne’s Budget in March would be the natural time to
“take stock and see if some adjustments should be made”.

Mr Blanchard was speaking before this morning’s keenly awaited Gross Domestic
Product data, which is expected to reveal that the economy had negligible
growth in 2012 and may have slipped back into negative territory in the
final quarter of the year.